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2016
Textiles amérindiens. Regards croisés sur les couleurs

The sounds and tastes of colours : hue and saturation in Isluga textiles

Los sonidos y sabores de los colores : la tinta y la saturación en los textiles de Isluga
Les sons et les goûts des couleurs : teinte et saturation dans les textiles d’Isluga
Penelope Dransart

Résumés

Mettant en exergue le concept de teinte, cet article examine les qualités des couleurs présentes dans les textiles ethnographiques d’Isluga, dans le Nord du Chili, en se référant à des idées concernant la synesthésie et le chromatisme. Il entreprend d’explorer les relations entre la lumière, les couleurs, le son et le goût face à la trajectoire historique de fabrication industrielle des fils de laine achetés au marché qui ont supplanté la teinture domestique. Un intérêt particulier est porté aux notions de saturation ainsi qu’à la manière avec laquelle les tisserandes exploitent les contrastes entre les teintes, employant de larges quantités de laine d’alpaca de couleurs naturelles et de minces rayures de couleurs obtenues par teinture. Au cours de la majeure partie du vingtième siècle, l’usage de couleurs intenses a été moindre chez les tisserandes d’Isluga que chez celles d’autres régions andines. Par le biais des théories anthropologiques sur la couleur, la compréhension métaphysique des tisserandes concernant la notion de saturation de la couleur est analysée alors qu’elles manifestent la volonté d’introduire de plus amples quantités de couleurs vives. Le présent article vient de l’observation de terrain menée par l’auteure à Isluga depuis le milieu des années 1980.

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This essay is dedicated to the memory of Doña Natividad Castro of Enquelga, Isluga. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the people of Isluga who shared their knowledge with me. Also I wish to thank the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia for granting me a Visiting Fellowship and Raphael Valluy for helping to translate the French abstract. Any errors or infelicities remain my responsibility.

1In Isluga, a community of herders of llamas, alpacas and sheep in the highlands of the far north of Chile, weavers combine the natural colours of fleece with smaller areas of artificially dyed hues in their textiles. In the past they spun and dyed sheep wool to introduce bright and clear accents into fabrics otherwise woven from camelid fibre yarns that ranged from white, through browns and greys, to black. Synthetic dyes were bought by the onza (“ounce”) and fixed by an aluminium mordant which did not, however, prevent the yarns from fading when exposed to the fiercely strong, ultra-violet-rich sunlight that prevails at high altitudes. Since the 1970s, weavers have been using increasing amounts of industrially spun acrylic yarns. Although these yarns have to be purchased from a once-a-fortnight market on the frontier with Bolivia, which means that a weaver has to possess the necessary cash to make the purchase, people appreciate their apparently never-ending capacity to maintain their strength of hue.

2I came to realize that weavers have highly developed concepts concerning where it was appropriate to use the most intense colours in a textile and that these concepts were somehow related to when people used the blankets, bags and garments that women weave. Other changes were to come to pass. On my first visit in 1986 to Enquelga, a community in Isluga, there was no electric light, but by the 1990s a generator had been installed and the constant glare of bare light bulbs filled people’s houses during evening hours, forever changing their experience of perceiving colours after the sun has set.

  • 1 Stephenson, R.H., Goethe’s conception of knowledge and science, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Pre (...)

3For Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the poet scientist who lived in an age before electricity permeated our lives, understanding the world was fundamentally a sensuous activity. In what has been acclaimed as “one of the most magnificent passages in the whole of his scientific writings”1, Goethe wrote,

  • 2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Preface to Theory of Colours, as cited in Stephenson, Goethe’s concept (...)

Colours are the actions of light, actions and sufferings. In this sense, we can expect to learn about light from them. Colours and light stand in the most precise relationship to one another ; but we must think of both as belonging to the whole of Nature for it is she, as a whole, who wants to reveal herself concretely in this way to the sense organ of the eye. In exactly the same way Nature as a whole uncovers herself to every other sense. Close your eyes, prick up your ears, and from the softest sound to the wildest noise, from the simplest tone to the highest harmony, from the most violent, passionate scream to the gentlest words of sweet reason, it is but Nature who speaks, revealing her being, her power, her life, and her relatedness so that a blind person, to whom the infinitely visible world is denied, can grasp an infinite vitality in what can be heard2.

  • 3 For a description of such weaves, see Cason, Marjorie and Cahlander, Adele, The art of Bolivian hig (...)

4Isluga people do not have a hypostatic notion of what Goethe called “Nature” but, on the basis of what they say, they do experience their relationship with colours and light sensuously. In Araxsaya, Isluga’s upper moiety, where I have spent most of my time during fieldwork, women born in the 1940s or 1950s told me that they started to adopt the pebble weaves that arrived from La Paz via Manqhasaya, the lower or “inner” moiety, which is geographically nearest the border with Bolivia3. They and, in turn, their daughters developed a repertoire of colours that took inspiration not so much from the pigmented qualities of dyes but from the prismatic refraction of light. In their younger days, these weavers selected the richest, darkest fleece from their herds of alpacas to spin and weave a dress for their own use or for a daughter. They only incorporated narrow flashes of strong hues at the hem. Belts, worn by men and women alike, seem always to have been brightly coloured but usually they are hidden by the folds of the upper part of the dress or, when worn by a man, underneath the shirt and trousers. Until the widespread introduction of industrially made garments, a woman might live in her dress both night and day from the sun’s rise to its zenith and then to its setting. A blanket, in contrast, although woven in the full light of the sun outside the homestead or on the edge of the pasture grounds, where the family’s herds graze, is intended for the darkness of an interior space. Isluga weavers fill the whole width of some blankets with a series of narrow, graduated stripes called k’isa in tones of red/pink, orange, green and blue because its main function will be to protect sleepers in the chill, dark interior of a room, which until the 1990s was unlikely to have anything more than an unglazed slip of a window.

  • 4 Dransart, Penelope, “Coloured knowledges : vision and the dissemination of knowledge in Isluga, nor (...)

5The most vivid of colours in Isluga textiles, it seemed, would form too strong a conjunction if exposed to the brightest of light conditions, when the sun is at it highest in the sky. I also began to notice that older people reacted differently to the extensive use of saturated hues than younger weavers, who seemed to have fewer inhibitions against incorporating them in their textiles4. Despite the generational changes that were occurring, however, weavers were relying on culturally shared precepts for using colours in a socially acceptable manner.

  • 5 Merriam-Webster, Dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, [available from internet], consulted on Febru (...)
  • 6 Taussig, Michael, What color is the sacred ? University of Chicago, 2009, p. 235 [emphasis in the o (...)

6While not wishing to underplay the power of colours to stimulate and evoke many sorts of perceptual and emotional responses in different viewers, my main focus in this essay concerns metaphysical matrices relating to the use, in particular, of saturated hues. Saturation refers to the chromatic purity of a colour and its “freedom from dilution with white”5. Intensity of hue, “free” from pallor, was once a transitory condition but, with the introduction of industrially spun acrylic yarns coloured with chemically synthesized dyes, the saturation became locked into the very thread that people bought in the Bolivian market. Before the introduction of standardized dyes, Michael Taussig observed, artificial hues were ephemeral, like the weather conditions that bleached them. Dyes, he commented, were considered to be “fugitive, like escaped prisoners” but industrial chemists succeeded in capturing their intensity so that they no longer were capable of escaping “as they had before under the impact of sun, rain, or the passing of time”6.

  • 7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The raw and the cooked. Introduction to a science of mythology : I, translate (...)
  • 8 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, p. 47.

7Historically, Isluga weavers wove textiles that were unusually restrained in the use of both patterning and intense colours compared to those of other Aymara- or Quechua-speaking communities in the South Central Andes. Their reticence reminds me of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s account of Bororo women’s predilection for sombre colours and their rejection of striped or flowered trade cloth7. They coloured cotton straps with Bixa orellana (red urucu), but the transitory character of the bright red contributed to what Lévi-Strauss saw as the austerity of women’s dress in contrast to the brilliance of the colours donned by men8. In Isluga, vivid hues were once largely denied to both women and men but, as this discussion will indicate, there are occasions when saturated colours must be used.

  • 9 Cereceda, Verónica, “Aproximaciones a una estética andina : de la belleza al tinku”, in Javier Medi (...)
  • 10 As a visual phenomenon, a k’isa serves as a homology to aural sensation in a microtonal rising. See (...)
  • 11 Arnold, Denise Y. and Espejo, Elvira “The intrusive k’isa : Bolivian struggles over colour patterns (...)

8As a series of tonal steps of colour, the k’isa configuration has been subject to some debate. During her fieldwork of the 1970s, Isluga women told Verónica Cereceda that k’isa were the “light” of a textile and that the tones recall a rainbow9. From my own fieldwork in Isluga from the mid-1980s to the 2000s, I found that weavers discussed k’isa in terms of sound. Cereceda emphasized the visual aspect, drawing attention to it by calling the configuration a degradación, which in Spanish is a technical term used by art historians for the painterly use of aerial perspective to express distance (colours seen from a distance, as they approach the horizon, lose their saturation compared to those nearer the viewer). In contrast, weavers who taught me to weave relied on an aural terminology. Therefore I perceive k’isa to be the textile equivalent to what, in musical terms, would be called a “microtonal rising”.10 A third view on the inspiration for the k’isa is based on another visual source in a different part of the Andes. Denise Arnold and Elvira Espejo found that the source of weavers’ inspiration for stripe sequences in textiles from the shores of Lake Titicaca derived from patterns of light and dark observed on the surface of the lake11. Whether perceived as a falling cadence or a rising scale, k’isa configurations in Isluga textiles depend on a visual arrangement of short intervals. Acknowledging Lévi-Strauss’s attentiveness to periodicities in his analysis of myths, this essay explores correspondences in intensity (or saturation) between sounds, colours and light as expressed in Isluga textiles.

Figure 1 – Detail of a loom set up by Isabel Castro of Isluga for weaving one half of a carrying shawl. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Photograph : Penelope Dransart

Sensuous correspondences

  • 12 On the epistemologically productive strategy in which the researcher recognizes herself as being an (...)

9In warping up the loom, Isluga weavers establish the colour sequences that will characterize the completed product in a striped warp-faced textile (Figure 1). It is important, one weaver explained, that the colours “sound out”. I noticed that colour choices displaying insufficient clarity of contrast were condemned as dead, as qaqa (“lead”), which meant they were q’ayma (“tasteless” or “faded”). In my halting attempts to learn Aymara in Isluga, I soon discovered that if I attempted to elicit from someone a term for “colour” I would be met with a puzzled look. After a pause a person might respond by suggesting an Aymaraized form of the Spanish “color” : kulura. As I lived through the experience of doing fieldwork in Isluga, the people who opened up their views on colours to me enabled me to confront my own training in the use of colours. Their social worlds challenged me to question that inheritance and encouraged me to understand their values12. My grandfather was a dyer of silks and velvets used in the making of flowers for ladies’ hats and he worked in Paris, Oporto and London. Figure 2 is of one of his shade cards demonstrating the range of synthetic dyes at his disposal. My own experience as an undergraduate at an art school in Scotland also exposed me to European colour theories and the training I received was influenced by some of the ideas that had emanated from the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Weimar. For various reasons, I arrived in Isluga already predisposed to find a phenomenon called “colour”.

Figure 2 – Shade card used by Charles Alphonse Victor Dransart, a Parisian dyer and maker of artificial flowers for women’s millinery.

Photograph : Penelope Dransart

  • 13 Lucca, Manuel de, Diccionario práctico aymara-castellano, castellano-aymara, La Paz/Cochabamba, Edi (...)
  • 14 Arnold, Denise Y. and Yapita, Juan de Dios, Río de vellón, río de canto. Cantar a los animales, una (...)
  • 15 Arnold, Denise Y. and Yapita, Juan de Dios, Río de vellón, p. 231.

10In Aymara – Spanish dictionaries, the term sami is sometimes glossed as “colour” or la suerte (“luck”) and, as a root for the term samiri, as a colourant13. It can also mean anything that might be described as “misty”, “hazy” or “diaphanous” or, alternatively, it refers to something that dispels haziness. A samiri conjures up diaphanous qualities and it causes them, conversely, to dissipate. Samiri are the spirits of breath and, through breath, Aymara speaking women in Qaqachaka, Bolivia, sing to their animals and they sing of their fleece colours. Denise Arnold and Juan de Dios Yapita report that, for these women, samiri are lights, colours, brilliance and sounds14. Their singing suffuses sheep and goats with the colours of their fleece and coats but, in contrast, llamas receive their fleece colours from the twinkling of the stars in the celestial llama constellation15. As a term, therefore, samiri is evidently tricky to pin down and one might, too, say the same about colours as a phenomenon.

  • 16 Simpson, J.A. and Weiner, E.S.C., The Oxford English dictionary, second edition, Clarendon Press, O (...)
  • 17 Howard, Luke, The climate of London : deduced from meteorological observations, made in the metropo (...)
  • 18 Dransart, Penelope, “Mysteries of the cloaked body : analogy and metaphor in concepts of weaving an (...)
  • 19 Phipps, Elena, “‘Tornesol [sic]’ : a Colonial synthesis of European and Andean textile traditions”, (...)
  • 20 Phipps, “Tornesol”, p. 222.

11The situation calls to mind the English term “nimbus”, which is a “bright cloud, or cloudlike splendour” surrounding divinities when they are seen on earth as well as a dark “rain cloud”16. In a nineteenth-century contribution to the standardization of weather forecasting, Luke Howard passed an aesthetic judgement with his comment that the Nimbus was “one of the least beautiful of Clouds” save for being “now and then superbly decorated with its attendant the rainbow ; which is seen in perfection when backed by the widely-extended uniform gloom of this Modification”17. Isluga textiles of the latter part of the twentieth century displayed an analogous form of colour contrast in counterposing narrow stripes of saturated hues against an extensive area of black or dark brown (Figure 3). The garments, especially those of the women, displayed glimpses of brightness as the wearer moved. Although the form of women’s dress in Isluga is directly descended from the Inka aqsu,18 the colour choices are not Inka in style and they seem to express the sorts of contradictions that Elena Phipps considered in relation to the predominantly dark garments adopted during the Colonial period in the south-central Andes19. The Colonial period tornasol cloth she discussed is very different from Isluga textiles, but it does share certain aesthetic qualities with them because the outwardly visible and extensive darkness of the warp predominant weave allows glimpses of an intensely hued weft inside the textile. In tornasol, a black (or dark green, or blue) warp spun from camelid fibre all but conceals glossy pink, light blue, green or yellow silk weft20. The weft glimmers when the cloth is worn, as it catches the light.

Figure 3 – Woman weaving while wearing an Isluga-style dress (urkhu). Note the glimpse of k’isa at the hem.

Photograph : Penelope Dransart

  • 21 “Coloured/reddened, brilliant and spherical” ; Martíñez, Gabriel, “El sistema de los uywiris en Isl (...)

12During the second half of the twentieth century in Isluga, saturated hues seemed almost to possess an occult quality. The extensive use of vivid colours in blankets was contained when spread on a bed in the dark cave-like interior of a house. Gabriel Martíñez heard people mention mysterious small stones that they related to places called juturi – the geographically situated origin points of herd animals – and if they found one it would be carefully guarded in the interior darkness of the house with the owner’s other ritual paraphernalia, most likely wrapped up in a cloth to contain its dangerous brilliance. From people’s description, Martíñez characterized these little khujchaña as “coloreadas, brillantes … y redondas”21. To find them promised to bring “gran suerte”, or extremely good fortune, in the multiplication of one’s herd animals. But the promise of good fortune had to be tempered by the careful possession of such an ambivalent object to prevent its shininess and saturated hues from seeping out and combining with the strong light of day. Such an eventuality might bring sickness.

13In the 1970s and 1980s, young weavers started to become far more daring in introducing more brilliant hues in the k’isas of a textile. Isabel Castro set up the loom in Figure 1 as a commission in 1987 for the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. She selected hues and colour contrasts to recall the design choices she would have made for weaving a carrying shawl when she was still a teenager. There is a broad central expanse of a dark natural brown warped from undyed alpaca yarns and for the border she chose bright acrylic yarns bought in the Bolivian market. The saturated red of this border is crossed lengthwise by a narrow stripe containing a design executed in a pebble weave in which the light colours form abstract figures on a dark ground. This design-bearing stripe is flanked by k’isas of orange, green, pink and blue ordered progressively in short intervals from light to saturated (or, conversely, from saturated to light).

  • 22 Apaza Suca, N., Komarek, K., Llanque Chana, D. and Ochoa Villanueva, V., Diccionario aymara-castell (...)
  • 23 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, p. 265.

14Weavers, as mentioned above, use the term k’isa analogously as an atmospheric effect caused by light or as an aural effect produced by music. The word itself, however, does not have a direct relationship to such meanings because it refers to the longitudinal wrinkles in fruit that is over-ripe22. A correspondence is made here between the microtonal rising of colours and the overbearing taste of sugar-rich fruit at the moment just before it collapses into rottenness. Lévi-Strauss might have described it as the “sweet call of decay”23.

15Weavers take great care to make sure that their colour choices produce a rich-sounding contrast and will make changes after they have started weaving if they are not fully satisfied. Isabel Castro initially warped the carrying shawl (see again Figure 1) to have a k’isa that started pink and blended into green immediately left of the patterned pebble weave stripe. After entering several passes of the weft, she changed her mind because the pink was too close in tonality to the half (ch’ulla or “uneven”) k’isa next left in the broad red border. She cut out the pink threads and replaced them with orange. And to add greater contrast to the k’isa that coincided with the edge of the textile, she inserted an extra warp bout of black thread to serve as the selvedge and to complete the outermost orange k’isa visible on the left of the photograph. This attention to detail was not an isolated occurrence. On another occasion I observed a teenager changing a k’isa that started life as a ch’ulla k’isa in pink to one that blended from pink to green through the addition of extra warp bouts. Such a combination caused the k’isa to vibrate against the saturated red of the border.

  • 24 McNelly “Natives, women and Claude Lévi-Strauss : a reading of Tristes tropiques as myth”, The Mass (...)
  • 25 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes tropiques, Paris, Plon, 1993 [1955], p. 137 [my translation].

16That colours and sounds both emit vibrations contributed to Lévi-Strauss’s evaluation of empirical categories (such as the raw and the cooked which, in the context of this essay, would correspond with the undyed and the dyed). An important term in his conceptual vocabulary was gamme (“gamut”), whether that of intervals in music or in tonal sequences of colours. Commentators have observed that he took inspiration from Baudelaire and Rimbaud on concepts of synaesthesia and correspondances. Baudelaire perceived poetic signification to be taste-like in producing sensations from the combination and contrast of ideas ; poetry’s expressiveness is present in colours and forms, both visual and aural24. A predilection for correspondences couched in metonymic idioms, Lévi-Strauss argued, characterizes the thought processes of Westerners and non-Westerners alike. If people declare space to have its own values, just as “sounds and scents have colours and feelings possess weight”, then they are seeking to establish correspondences within “a limited gamut of possibilities”25.

  • 26 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, p. 19. R.H. Stephenson thought that Goethe’s writing had “for (...)
  • 27 Taussig, Michael, What color is the sacred ? Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 6 a (...)

17Sensory experience – accompanied by a notion of estrangement or alienation – undergirds key metaphysical passages in the writings of Lévi-Strauss and Taussig. Both authors found inspiration in Proust for whom the senses were porous and for whom the fall of light caused colours to reveal themselves. Equally, both authors reacted to the scientific work of Goethe. Lévi-Strauss did not personify nature as did Goethe, but he stated that colours “are present ‘naturally’ in nature” in contrast to music and myth, which he assigned to a cultural realm26. Taussig noted, as did Goethe, that colours make themselves present through the senses rather than serving as a sign or a code27. But then Taussig added a twist to this argument to deny light as the only cause of colours, by alluding to a seventh-century author, Isidore of Seville, who thought there was an etymological correspondence between heat (calor) and colours (color), which streamed from sunlight or fire.

  • 28 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss, translated Felicity Baker, London, (...)
  • 29 Taussig, What color is the sacred ? p. 225.

18In the 1930s, when undertaking fieldwork in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss met some people in lowland South America who had not previously been exposed to industrially synthesized dyes28. Taussig, in contrast, traced the global reach of industrialization in his observation that the production of dyes derived from developments in the German coal industry29. Germany was a country with much coal but, unlike other Western powers, it had few colonies, which were the source of naturally occurring pigments. “Coal-generated” colours were the unanticipated outcome of experiments on coal tar. First of all these experiments were for gas lighting and then to extract quinine from aniline, a coal product named after indigo. In this context, Lévi-Strauss’s “limited gamut of possibilities” might also apply to local responses to the global reach of industrially produced yarns with their locked in hues when they arrived in distant parts of the Andes.

  • 30 Arnold and Espejo, “The intrusive k’isa”, p. 263.
  • 31 Arnold and Espejo, “The intrusive k’isa”, p. 261-2.

19But here we reach another twist. Denise Arnold and Elvira Espejo traced the initial source of such yarns from Mexico from where they were traded, during the 1960s, in urban markets in Bolivia and thence into rural areas30. They, however, argue that these threads were not the stunningly intense hues that had so entranced the nineteenth-century chemists who had extracted them from the blackness of coal (see again Figure 2). Instead, they were pale versions produced by manufacturers at the end of a run of dye. For weavers on the shores of Lake Titicaca, the analogous taste sensation was insipid, of fruit past its best, not collapsing into strong-tasting rottenness but into pallor31. Aymara-speaking weavers on the shores of Lake Titicaca and in Isluga, therefore, made different responses to the aesthetic possibilities provided by these standardized threads.

Capturing the cadence of colours

  • 32 Worley, Sharon Joy, “Philipp Otto Runge and the semiotic language of nature and patriotism”, The Eu (...)

20To explore why weavers in the Andes developed different aesthetic strategies based on industrially dyed yarns as strong – or pallid – tasting, I want to say a little more on attempts to domesticate colours to capture them as predictable entities. In the minds of European scientists, colours possessed a spatial quality, the contours of which were mapped in the form of a sphere in 1810 by Philipp Otto Runge, a German artist who exchanged letters with Goethe32. Albert H. Munsell (1858-1918) developed this system further to devise the system of colour chips, which specialists sometimes use to identify colours in textiles.

Figure 4 – The Munsell Colour system, organized in scales of Hue, Value and Chroma.

Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license

  • 33 Birren, Faber, A grammar of color : a basic treatise on the color system of Albert H. Munsell, New (...)
  • 34 Birren, Grammar of color, p. 44-5.
  • 35 Arnold and Espejo, “The intrusive k’isa”, p. 263.

21Munsell’s concept of colour space converted Runge’s colour sphere into three scales (Hue, Value and Chroma). In an analogy with musical notation, Munsell divided the scale of hues into decades. According to Munsell, there are five simple Hues (red, yellow, green, blue and purple) and five compound or intermediate Hues (yellow-red, green-yellow, blue-green, purple-blue and red-purple). For didactic purposes he devised a tree diagram, with the Value axis serving as the trunk ; it ranged from black at the base to white at the top, with nine steps in between. Hence Value refers to the lightness or darkness of a colour. The third criterion is that of Chroma, or the degree of saturation of a colour, referring to its strength or weakness (or its greyness). Colours reach their maximum strength at different points on the grey axis and it is at this point that Runge’s sphere became less of a useful concept because it became asymmetrical. Red in Munsell’s scheme, with ten steps from its strongest point to the central grey scale, is twice a strong in Chroma as its opposite hue on the equator, blue-green, which has only five steps. In addition, colours do not share the same level of Value on which they achieve their maximum Chroma strength33. The purpose of Munsell’s research into the concept of a colour space was to standardize colour specification and to devise a system in which it would be possible to allocate a place within a system of numerical notation for any “new” hue that might be synthesized (Figure 4). Munsell’s scheme was highly abstract and he drew attention to correspondences between music and colours. According to Faber Birren, his ideas concerning balance and harmony demonstrated a predilection for middle value colours of muted intensity34. Munsell proposed a series of nine principles of colour harmony, including one called the “harmony of diminishing sequences” in which there is a progressive step decrease by one point of Value and one of Chroma from one colour to the next. This principle chimes well with the description provided by Arnold and Espejo for the adoption in the 1980s of “a new k’isa gamut of muted colour changes” in rural areas of Bolivia35.

  • 36 Itten, Johannes, The elements of color : a treatise on the color system of Johannes Itten based on (...)
  • 37 Here I have to declare an interest. I was introduced to this exercise when as a student at art scho (...)
  • 38 Itten, The elements of color, p. 54.

22Johannes Itten, who during the 1920s taught at the Bauhaus school of art, emphasized the intellectual properties and emotional charge of colours. He produced his own tripartite classification to account for the radiant energies of colour contrasts based on three “directions” : impression (or visual), expression (or emotional) and construction (or symbolical)36. An exercise he devised for art students, the colour star, was based on a ring containing twelve hues ; students painted the gradations of each in a series of twelve steps37. The point of saturation of individual hues occurs on a different step in the scale of gradations. “Pure yellow” occurs in step four, “orange” at step six, “red” at step eight, “blue” at step nine, and “violet” at step ten. Commenting that if one were to prepare columns of eighteen rather than twelve gradations, Itten stated that one would be able to connect the “points of highest purity” in a parabolic curve38. The lesson to be drawn from such an exercise is that if an artist wishes to make a composition based on the use of saturated yellow, the context of the rest of the painting must be light, but if he or she wishes to emphasize red or blue, the context must be dark. Itten explained,

  • 39 Itten, The elements of color, p. 54.

The radiant reds in Rembrandt’s paintings are so only because of contrast with yet darker tones. When he wants radiant yellows, he can bring them out in comparatively light groups, where saturated red would be felt merely as dark, without chromatic splendor39.

  • 40 Arnold and Espejo, “The intrusive k’isa”, p. 263, Figure 4.

23In combining saturated red with dark brown or black camelid yarns, Isluga weavers provided a context for producing chromatic splendour, especially as they tended to restrict blue to a narrow stripe to articulate the junction between the undyed darkness of the main body of the textile and the redness of the border (see Figure 1). Red is a favoured colour choice and women traditionally wore bright red shawls over their dark dresses. When, in the 1970s, they adopted the configuration that had been travelling round the globe along with the standardized dyes, they grouped their narrow stripes into microtonal intervals on a rising, not a diminishing scale. It is worth noting that acrylic yarns as sold to Isluga weavers in the Bolivian market ya k’isado (“already k’isa-ed”) are arrayed in vertical columns (Figure 5). This organizational principle differs from that presented by Arnold and Espejo, who arranged the gradations of k’isa colours in a horizontal manner, like the ripples lakeside weavers saw in the distant waters of Lake Titicaca40.

Figure 5 – Industrially manufactured acrylic yarns “ya k’isado” (“already k’isa-ed”) for sale in the once-a-fortnight market on the border between Bolivia and Chile.

Photograph : Penelope Dransart

The dangerousness of yellow

24The “palette” of k’isa colours used in Isluga since the 1970s and 1980s has been based on green, orange, pink/red and blue. Because the border of a carrying shawl is usually red, weavers are presented with a particular challenge – how to make the orange and pink/red k’isas sing out against the blood-red ground of the border ? The most severe criticisms I heard that people levelled against another’s colour choices concerned precisely this point.

  • 41 He gave rojo and vermejo as the Spanish glosses ; Torres Rubio, Diego de, Arte de la lengua aymará, (...)
  • 42 Torres Rubio, Arte, p. 50r. A similar nexus also appears in Bertonio, Ludovico, Vocabulario de la l (...)
  • 43 Gage, John, Colour and culture : practice and meaning from antiquity to abstraction, London, Thames (...)
  • 44 Gage, Colour and culture, p. 52.

25Yellow does not have an independent existence in this colour repertoire, but it does play an important role in enabling contrasts of sufficient sonority to be achieved, especially in an orange k’isa and sometimes also as the palest point of a green one. In an early seventeenth-century Aymara-Spanish dictionary, Diego de Torres-Rubio gave the term “paco” for red and scarlet hues41. From his listing of pacoñacuta as cabello rubio (“fair” or “ruddy” hair), it seems that the red spectrum also incorporated at least some aspects of yellowishness42. If this division of the spectrum was genuine, rather than a bias of dictionary compilers, it suggests that seventeenth-century Aymara usage had something in common with people in the classical world who believed that red served as the “chromatic representative of fire and of light”43. In Aristotle’s colour scale red sat next to light and, according to John Gage the redness associated with the sun had an “affinity” with gold44.

  • 45 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, p. 280
  • 46 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, p. 280-1.
  • 47 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, 280-281.
  • 48 Dransart, “Coloured knowledges”, 64.

26Appealing to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lévi-Strauss traced the term chroma from the Greek for “red” or “colour”45. In the Spanish language, colorado also refers to “red”. In these terms red is the fundamental colour term that gives birth to the chromaticism, at once beautiful because, as Rousseau noted, it adds “variety to the diatonic through its semitones” but also plaintive46. Noting that chromaticism occurred in many different parts of the world, Lévi-Strauss argued that South Americans endowed it with a “primordial maleficence” and that it was associated with the giving of life as well as the giving of death47. In Isluga owners of llamas, alpacas and sheep dress their animals with ear tassels and neck-pieces during family-led wayñu ceremonies intended to enhance their fertility. These items are arranged in k’isa, with red uppermost for the females of the herd48. People state that the vivid hues will not have an effect unless they are accompanied by singing, and these songs are sad. The very word wayñu is a musical term for a genre of music or dance. After sunset, the music becomes more joyful once it no longer has to accompany the microtonal rising of the k’isas, as seen during the bright light of day.

  • 49 The use of “aborrecer” in the sense of “enfermarse” has also been noted in the Spanish of Quechua s (...)
  • 50 Dransart, Penelope, Earth, water, fleece and fabric : an ethnography and archaeology of Andean came (...)

27In the 1980s elder women, some of them monolingual Aymara speakers, rejected the use of fleece dyed yellow for the wayñu ceremonies. There is a sense, however, that red has the potential to reveal itself as yellow. In late pre-Hispanic textiles from coastal areas of what is now Peru, red and yellow hues were frequently combined, but in Isluga weavers formerly restricted such a daring choice. For them, too much yellow was dangerous. On seeing a young woman wearing second-hand clothing traded from North America, a companion shared a confidence with me, whispering in my ear, that the yellow in the young woman’s skirt was likely to “abhor” (aborrecer) her husband, using the Spanish term to mean that the yellow would cause illness49. Yellow light is particularly distrusted. Sometimes at the end of day, low raking sunlight suddenly gilds the land and air with its yellowness. Women and children rush indoors to protect themselves from its dangerous cast, which they term amaya, or “death”50.

28Younger generations of weavers in Isluga still have not released yellow fully into their textiles. But without attending art school, they know that the radiance of yellow requires a light visual context. Their dresses and carrying shawls no longer require to be as dark as in their grandparents’ time and the whiteness of the plain weave ground of the textile now permits them to expand the yellow in some of their k’isas (Figure 6).

Figure 6 – Detail of a carrying shawl woven by Silvia Challapa Castro of Isluga. Note the white ground of the textile.

Photograph : Penelope Dransart

Concluding thoughts : the extinction and rebirth of saturated hues

  • 51 Taussig, What color is the sacred ? p. 41.
  • 52 Taussig, What color is the sacred ? p. 234.
  • 53 Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to Marcel Mauss, p. 34-5.
  • 54 Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to Marcel Mauss, p. 54-5.
  • 55 Taussig, What color is the sacred ? p. 234 ; Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to Marcel Mauss, p. 55.

29When Isluga weavers started to experiment with the configurations of narrow stripes they now call k’isa, they used industrially synthesized aniline dyes that replaced dyestuffs derived from plant and insect sources. These aniline hues, mordanted with locally obtained aluminium or with juice squeezed from imported lemons, were hardly less fugitive than the “natural” dyes they formerly used. The freedom from fading came with the industrially spun acrylic yarns, which refused to conform to what had, up to then, been the normal life cycle of a dyed thread with its propensity to diminish in saturation. Artificial colour was what Taussig called an “ethereal substance”, but with these yarns it became excessively so51. And because a weaver required money to obtain it, rather than having one of her alpacas or sheep grow the fleece for her and gathering stuffs with which to dye it, the thread became a paradigmatic commodity. Such hues, locked into a thread, are an example of what Taussig dubbed the “commodity’s commodity” and he likened their ethereal (but captive) condition to anthropologists’ apprehension of mana52. Lévi-Strauss noted that Marcel Mauss regarded the Polynesian concept of mana as a kind of mental “fourth dimension” and that it acted both as an “unconscious category” and as a “category of collective thinking”53. He claimed that this fourth dimension enables people to assimilate things with which they are unfamiliar54. Taussig commented that Lévi-Strauss attempted to demystify mana by referring to it as “oomph”, an ethereal strangeness that some individuals possess, and also something that pertains to the “sacred and taboo-laden atmosphere which permeates sexual life”55. It is therefore appropriate to mention that one of the most important reasons a young woman has for weaving dresses and shawls with their potent k’isas, or microtonal risings, is to beguile potential suitors when dancing during carnival. This festival, held at the beginning of Lent, is often said to be a time when young people elope. It is, in this light, also no accident that the wayñu, another festival of the rainy season (when the air in Isluga is in its most saturated condition), has the explicit purpose to celebrate the coming into sexual maturity of the young llamas and alpacas. Moist atmospheric conditions of course provide a matrix in which colours can be perceived in their intensity as opposed to blazing sunshine accompanied by arid atmospheric conditions, which bleach dyed hues into extinction. Isabel Castro selected the colours for the loom she warped specially for a museum to capture the memories of what her younger self might have worn to carnival, using hues that will continue to sound out and retain their oomph down the ages.

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Bibliographie

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Arnold, Denise Y. and Espejo, Elvira “The intrusive k’isa : Bolivian struggles over colour patterns and their social implications”, World Art, 2012, vol. 2-2, p. 251-278.

Arnold, Denise Y. and Espejo, Elvira, Ciencia de tejer en los Andes : estructuras y técnicas de faz de urdimbre, La Paz, Fundación Albó, 2012.

Arnold, Denise Y. and Yapita, Juan de Dios, Río de vellón, río de canto. Cantar a los animales, una poética andina de la creación, La Paz, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, 1998.

Bertonio, Ludovico, Vocabulario de la lengua aymara, La Paz/Cochabamba, Ceres, 1984 [1612].

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Cason, Marjorie and Cahlander, Adele, The art of Bolivian highland weaving, New York, Watson-Guptill Publications, 1976.

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Dransart, Penelope, “Mysteries of the cloaked body : analogy and metaphor in concepts of weaving and body tissues”, Trivium, 2007, vol. 37, 161-187 [on line], consulted February 26 2014, URL : https://www.academia.edu/288294/Mysteries_of_the_cloaked_body_analogy_and_metaphor_in_concepts_of_weaving_and_body_tissues

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Hill, Jonathan D. “Myth, spirit naming, and the art of microtonal rising : childbirth rituals of the Arawakan Wakuénai”, Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana, 1985, vol. 6-1, p. 1-30.

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Stephenson, R.H., Goethe’s conception of knowledge and science, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1995.

Stobart, Henry, Music and the poetics of production in the Bolivian Andes, Aldershot, Hants, Ashgate, SOAS Musicology Series, 2006.

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Notes

1 Stephenson, R.H., Goethe’s conception of knowledge and science, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1995.

2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Preface to Theory of Colours, as cited in Stephenson, Goethe’s conception of knowledge, 49-50, in his translation from Goethe’s Hamburger Ausgabe Vol 13 : 351.

3 For a description of such weaves, see Cason, Marjorie and Cahlander, Adele, The art of Bolivian highland weaving, New York : Watson-Guptill Publications, 1976. Anne Pollard Rowe used the following terms for them : “complementary-warp weave with three-span floats aligned in alternate pairs” ; Rowe, Anne P., Warp-patterned weaves of the Andes, Washington D.C., The Textile Museum, 1977, p. 70 and fig. 80. In contrast, Elvira Espejo termed them “conteo por par, 2/2” ; Arnold, Denise Y. and Espejo, Elvira, Ciencia de tejer en los Andes : estructuras y técnicas de faz de urdimbre, La Paz, Fundación Albó, 2012, p. 203-226.

4 Dransart, Penelope, “Coloured knowledges : vision and the dissemination of knowledge in Isluga, northern Chile”, in Henry Stobart and Rosaleen Howard (dir.), Knowledge and learning in the Andes, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2002, p. 56-78.

5 Merriam-Webster, Dictionary, Encyclopedia Britannica, [available from internet], consulted on February 24 2014, URL : http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/saturation

6 Taussig, Michael, What color is the sacred ? University of Chicago, 2009, p. 235 [emphasis in the original].

7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The raw and the cooked. Introduction to a science of mythology : I, translated John and Doreen Wightman, London, Jonathan Cape, 1970, p. 320-21.

8 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, p. 47.

9 Cereceda, Verónica, “Aproximaciones a una estética andina : de la belleza al tinku”, in Javier Medina (dir.), Tres reflexiones sobre el pensamiento andino, La Paz, Hisbol, 1987, p. 133-231.

10 As a visual phenomenon, a k’isa serves as a homology to aural sensation in a microtonal rising. See Hill, Jonathan D. 1985. “Myth, spirit naming, and the art of microtonal rising : childbirth rituals of the Arawakan Wakuénai”, Latin American Music Review / Revista de Música Latinoamericana 6-1, p. 1-30, and Stobart, Henry, Music and the poetics of production in the Bolivian Andes, Aldershot, Hants, Ashgate, SOAS Musicology Series, 2006, p. 113.

11 Arnold, Denise Y. and Espejo, Elvira “The intrusive k’isa : Bolivian struggles over colour patterns and their social implications”, World Art, 2012, vol. 2-2, p. 251-278.

12 On the epistemologically productive strategy in which the researcher recognizes herself as being an individual as well as being the means through which the research is conducted, see Coffey, Amanda, The ethnographic self : fieldwork and the representation of identity, London, Sage, 1999, p. 37.

13 Lucca, Manuel de, Diccionario práctico aymara-castellano, castellano-aymara, La Paz/Cochabamba, Editorial Los Amigos del Libro, 1987, p. 146.

14 Arnold, Denise Y. and Yapita, Juan de Dios, Río de vellón, río de canto. Cantar a los animales, una poética andina de la creación, La Paz, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, 1998, p. 198.

15 Arnold, Denise Y. and Yapita, Juan de Dios, Río de vellón, p. 231.

16 Simpson, J.A. and Weiner, E.S.C., The Oxford English dictionary, second edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, vol. X, p. 425.

17 Howard, Luke, The climate of London : deduced from meteorological observations, made in the metropolis and various places around it, 2nd edition, London, Harvey and Darton, 1833, p. li.

18 Dransart, Penelope, “Mysteries of the cloaked body : analogy and metaphor in concepts of weaving and body tissues”, Trivium, 2007, vol. 37, p. 161-187 [on line], consulted February 26 2014, URL : http://www.academia.edu/288294/Mysteries_of_the_cloaked_body_analogy_and_metaphor_in_concepts_of_weaving_and_body_tissues

19 Phipps, Elena, “‘Tornesol [sic]’ : a Colonial synthesis of European and Andean textile traditions”, Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, 2000, Paper 834, p. 221-230.

20 Phipps, “Tornesol”, p. 222.

21 “Coloured/reddened, brilliant and spherical” ; Martíñez, Gabriel, “El sistema de los uywiris en Isluga”, Anales de la Universidad del Norte (Homenaje al Dr Gustavo Le Paige S.J.), 1976, vol. 10, p. 255-327.

22 Apaza Suca, N., Komarek, K., Llanque Chana, D. and Ochoa Villanueva, V., Diccionario aymara-castellano. Arunakan liwru aymara-kastillanu, Lima/Puno, Proyecto Experimental de Educación Bilingüe, 1984, p. 108.

23 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, p. 265.

24 McNelly “Natives, women and Claude Lévi-Strauss : a reading of Tristes tropiques as myth”, The Massachusetts Review, 1975, vol. 16, p. 7-29 ; Wiseman, Boris, “Structure and sensation”, in Boris Wiseman (dir.), The Cambridge companion to Lévi-Strauss, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 296-314.

25 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes tropiques, Paris, Plon, 1993 [1955], p. 137 [my translation].

26 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, p. 19. R.H. Stephenson thought that Goethe’s writing had “formalistic overtones” in the way he (Goethe) discussed morphology and that it misled Lévi-Strauss into regarding it as a “precursor of structuralism” (Stephenson, Goethe’s conception of knowledge, p. 1). But John Petitot has traced two naturalist traditions, in which growth and form are treated in a dynamic manner, that link Goethe with Lévi-Strauss. This view is in contrast to the conventional perspective, according to which structuralism is said to be the outcome of a formalist tradition (Petitot, John, “Morphology and structural aesthetic : from Goethe to Lévi-Strauss”, in Boris Wiseman (dir.), Lévi-Strauss, anthropology, and aesthetics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 275-295.

27 Taussig, Michael, What color is the sacred ? Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 6 and 54.

28 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss, translated Felicity Baker, London, Routledge, 1987 [1950], p. 54.

29 Taussig, What color is the sacred ? p. 225.

30 Arnold and Espejo, “The intrusive k’isa”, p. 263.

31 Arnold and Espejo, “The intrusive k’isa”, p. 261-2.

32 Worley, Sharon Joy, “Philipp Otto Runge and the semiotic language of nature and patriotism”, The European Legacy, 2010, vol. 15, p. 15-33, [on line] uploaded January 26, 2010, consulted on March 27, 2010. URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770903516196

33 Birren, Faber, A grammar of color : a basic treatise on the color system of Albert H. Munsell, New York : Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1969, p. 24-25.

34 Birren, Grammar of color, p. 44-5.

35 Arnold and Espejo, “The intrusive k’isa”, p. 263.

36 Itten, Johannes, The elements of color : a treatise on the color system of Johannes Itten based on his book the art of color, translated E. van Hagen, New York, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970, p. 17.

37 Here I have to declare an interest. I was introduced to this exercise when as a student at art school in Scotland during the 1970s.

38 Itten, The elements of color, p. 54.

39 Itten, The elements of color, p. 54.

40 Arnold and Espejo, “The intrusive k’isa”, p. 263, Figure 4.

41 He gave rojo and vermejo as the Spanish glosses ; Torres Rubio, Diego de, Arte de la lengua aymará, Lima, Concilio provincial, 1616, p. 62v and 92r. Nowadays people restrict the term to the cinnamon-brown of alpaca fleece or the back of a vicuña.

42 Torres Rubio, Arte, p. 50r. A similar nexus also appears in Bertonio, Ludovico, Vocabulario de la lengua aymara, La Paz/Cochabamba, Ceres, 1984 [1612], p. 417.

43 Gage, John, Colour and culture : practice and meaning from antiquity to abstraction, London, Thames and Hudson, 1993, p. 26.

44 Gage, Colour and culture, p. 52.

45 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, p. 280

46 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, p. 280-1.

47 Lévi-Strauss, The raw and the cooked, 280-281.

48 Dransart, “Coloured knowledges”, 64.

49 The use of “aborrecer” in the sense of “enfermarse” has also been noted in the Spanish of Quechua speakers by Bugallo, Lucila, “Wak’as de la puna jujeña. Lo fluido y lo fino en el diálogo con Pachamama”, in Lucila Bugallo and Mario Vilca (eds), Wak’as, diablos y muertos : alteridades significantes en el mundo andino, in press.

50 Dransart, Penelope, Earth, water, fleece and fabric : an ethnography and archaeology of Andean camelid herding, London, Routledge, 2002, p. 273, n°15.

51 Taussig, What color is the sacred ? p. 41.

52 Taussig, What color is the sacred ? p. 234.

53 Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to Marcel Mauss, p. 34-5.

54 Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to Marcel Mauss, p. 54-5.

55 Taussig, What color is the sacred ? p. 234 ; Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to Marcel Mauss, p. 55.

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Table des illustrations

Légende Figure 1 – Detail of a loom set up by Isabel Castro of Isluga for weaving one half of a carrying shawl. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
Crédits Photograph : Penelope Dransart
URL http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/docannexe/image/69188/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 76k
Légende Figure 2 – Shade card used by Charles Alphonse Victor Dransart, a Parisian dyer and maker of artificial flowers for women’s millinery.
Crédits Photograph : Penelope Dransart
URL http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/docannexe/image/69188/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 108k
Légende Figure 3 – Woman weaving while wearing an Isluga-style dress (urkhu). Note the glimpse of k’isa at the hem.
Crédits Photograph : Penelope Dransart
URL http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/docannexe/image/69188/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 76k
Légende Figure 4 – The Munsell Colour system, organized in scales of Hue, Value and Chroma.
Crédits Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license
URL http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/docannexe/image/69188/img-4.png
Fichier image/png, 99k
Légende Figure 5 – Industrially manufactured acrylic yarns “ya k’isado” (“already k’isa-ed”) for sale in the once-a-fortnight market on the border between Bolivia and Chile.
Crédits Photograph : Penelope Dransart
URL http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/docannexe/image/69188/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 104k
Légende Figure 6 – Detail of a carrying shawl woven by Silvia Challapa Castro of Isluga. Note the white ground of the textile.
Crédits Photograph : Penelope Dransart
URL http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/docannexe/image/69188/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 114k
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Penelope Dransart, « The sounds and tastes of colours : hue and saturation in Isluga textiles »Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [En ligne], Colloques, mis en ligne le 07 juillet 2016, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/69188 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.69188

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Penelope Dransart

University of Wales Trinity Saint David
p.dransart@tsd.ac.uk

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